If you want to run Windows from a Virtual PC image (running on Windows 7) instead of testing on Hyper-V, VMWare or physical hardware, you will need to update the “Validation” settings of your Task Sequence.

Change the processor to “13MHz” in the screenshot below (which is what the processor is emulated at):

Advanced Format Drives have new levels of sector blocks and without a proper driver are not detected by Windows PE RTM. SP1 should fix the issue for you, but adding the latest Intel driver should also help you out.

We will now add the latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver to support advanced formatting of new 512E sector hard drives.

At the time of this writing, the driver was at version 10.6.0.1022 and available here.

Import the drivers into the Deployment Workbench for your Boot WIMs and OS Driver selection profiles.

Now that drivers are updated, we will edit the control files to support the new SP1 version over RTM edition of WAIK.

If you regenerate your boot WIMs at this point, the WIM looks for a RTM code in the registry. Since we are now on SP1, a change has to be made to look for the upgraded components.

NOTE: This breaks the use of Windows RE in Windows PE RTM. If you haven’t used RE in your image deployment solution, don’t worry about it.

If you do, you have to use an unsupported tweak to the Registry to make SP1 think it is RTM.